


an undigested apple-dumpling

by nicasio_silang



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-09
Updated: 2012-05-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:06:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trying to explain something of no great importance to someone who just doesn't get it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an undigested apple-dumpling

Amelia dreams that she is first in a line of sailors swimming inexpertly away from their ruined ship. The ship itself is an elegant, classic 17th-century frigate. Sixteen sails in all, hull the color of mud slung up onto the back window of a minivan. It’s listing further with each impact of a wave. Amelia has swum perhaps twenty feet away from it and towards the waiting rope ladder hung from its sister ship. She and her two crewmen are tugging a thick rope along with them. She paddles one-handed and digs her fingers into the rope. They are dragging their sinking vessel behind them.

The water is steel blue and choppy. The water is an ocean she has never seen in her life. She expects to move through it like she’s swum through swimming pools, but this water is a different substance altogether. It fights her; it does not want her.

One by one, the sailors lose their grip on the rope. It’s Amelia’s dream, and so the final failure is hers. She ducks her head under the surface and watches the rope whip down, down. When she brings her head back up into the air she shouts against the wind to console her fellows.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “We’re alive. “

In that moment, she believes it. They swim freely now, and reach the second ship. 

The dream blinks and then she’s sitting in an inner cabin, wrapped in a blanket. Her remaining crew are there, as is this ship’s captain. This is the role Castiel has been given to play. She doesn’t recognize him. He’s in the shape of a professor she had during her last year of college. A jowly man with a thin crown of red hair. He had caught her plagiarizing two sentences from a literary review for her term paper. He’d let it pass with a warning. She never told a soul.

She’s saying again, “We’re alive. That’s all that matters.”

The dream would like him to say, No, it isn’t. It would like him to list the provisions and unreplaceables lost with the sunken ship. Casks of whisky, bales of cotton, precious gems, sullen photos of Claire ages 2 - 4, rabbit pelts, and love letters written back and forth the summer that Jimmy worked an internship in St. Paul. The dream would love him to describe to her the shape of the dent in the rear fender of the family Camry. Amelia put it there by backing the car right into the edge of a dumpster because she was talking on the phone to Brandon from her office, was thinking about Brandon. It would like him to recount how she didn’t mention the dent, and when Jimmy noticed it, she raised an eyebrow at him, suggesting he’d done it himself.

Amelia is waiting. She’s impatient for these reminders. Castiel uses the hand of the professor to touch the side of her face.

“You’re alive,” he tells her. “You have everything you need.”

But dreams don’t work that way. Soon the inside of the ship is the inside of the Camry when she drops Jimmy off at work the morning after the dent was made. He’s telling her about something he saw on TV the other night, and is being long-winded about it. She wishes, over and over, that he'd stop talking.

She lingers on the feeling of wishing her husband away, and Castiel wanders the back seat, the trunk, the glove compartment. He checks under the brake and the accelerator. He twists between pistons in the engine, and in and out of the space between the side of her foot and the side of her shoe.

There's nothing in any of these places. He’s tired, and there is so much ground to cover. God is not here. Castiel retreats as Amelia is reaching for Jimmy’s knee. She can’t recall its shape. He leaves her with what he knows of Jimmy’s knee, although his observation of the body is admittedly incomplete. Her hand on the leg of the dream, she frowns. It feels unfamiliar.

Castiel steps backwards to the sea, then up into the waking earth, north to the frozen Canadian coast of Baffin Bay, and sidles alongside to the spring of 1907.


End file.
